Two Days of Learning How to Use Generative AI in My Research
(Text & Photos: Muqiu Du) In August 2026, I attended the doctoral course "Using Generative AI in Research". The course was organised by KATAJA and held at the Jyväskylä University School of Business and Economics on 26 and 27 August. I am a second-year PhD student and I work with a very large amount of text data, so the course came at a good moment for me. In this blog post, I would like to share what I learned during these two days and how it has already changed my research plans. My PhD research focuses on Work Exchange Sharing Accommodation, a niche sharing economy model where travellers exchange their labour for accommodation. My material is a large collection of reviews written by hosts and travellers on platforms such as Workaway and HelpX. In my current article, I use large language models to run aspect-based sentiment analysis on these reviews. Before the course, I had already finished a pretest where I compared different prompting strategies across four LLM APIs...